What follows is four versions of Ferguson’s story. The novel begins with the birth of Ferguson on 3 March 1947 to Stanley, who runs a furniture-appliance store in Newark, New Jersey, and Rose, who works for a photographer. Auster’s fiction has always explored the moments in which lives, thanks to chance and circumstance, take different directions, and in 4321 this idea is presented in its purest form. When lightning strikes, he is killed by a falling branch: “as his inert body lay on the water-soaked ground … thunder continued to crack, and from one end of the earth to the other, the gods were silent”.īut this is the fate of only one of four Archie Fergusons in the novel. Archie Ferguson, a 13-year-old full of promise, enthralled by The Catcher in the Rye and his first kisses, runs under a tree during a storm at summer camp. “I think it was the most important day of my life.”Ī similar incident occurs in Auster’s new novel, 4321. “I’ve always been haunted by what happened, the utter randomness of it,” he says. Little by little, the boy’s face was turning blue his eyes were half open, half shut, the whites were showing.” It took Auster a little while to absorb that, had the strike occurred just a few seconds later, it would have been him. Two or three other kids nearby had also been struck and were moaning “it was like a war scene. And for an hour, as we were pounded by intense rain, and attacked by lightning spears, I was holding on to the boy’s tongue so he didn’t swallow it”. I was closer to him than you are to me now my head was right near his feet.”Īuster didn’t realise the boy had died instantly. As the boy immediately in front of me was going under, lightning struck the fence. Someone said we should get to a clearing, and we had to crawl, single file, under a barbed wire fence. He was at summer camp: “there we were, nearly 20 of us caught in an electric storm in the woods. “It’s something I’ve never got over,” he tells me. W hen Paul Auster was 14, a boy just inches away from him was struck by lightning and killed.

4321 paul auster review